Culture, sexual lifeways, and developmental subjectivities: rethinking sexual taxonomies

Social Research, Summer, 1998 by Andrew J. Hostetler, Gilbert H. Herdt

by the multiple apparatuses of heteronormativity, is not to

resist: it is to surrender any hope of autonomy (p. 108;

emphasis in original).

And Edelman (1994, p. xvi) promotes the "deployment of `gay identity' as a signifier of resistance."

In short, a clear hierarchy emerges in which the gay man or lesbian who fails to resist (reject?) cultural and sexual norms-including "heteronormative" forms of sexual expression, intimacy, relationality, and family, among other things--is relegated to a position of compromised agency. These sentiments are also apparent in recent arguments within the lesbian and gay community against same-sex marriage (see for example Brownworth, 1996), arguments inspired by a long history of feminist and gay critiques of the institutions of marriage and the family. (Of course, it must also be noted that gay marriage and family advocates often unfairly reduce important political critique to adolescent-like rebellion, thus speciously equating maturity and agency with conformity to heterosexual norms). Thus, despite its compelling critique of normative sexual taxomonies, queer theory appears to produce its own norms and exclusions.

Queer Idealizations and the Missing Discourse on Subjectivity

The general failure to move beyond such black-and-white, all-or-nothing approaches to agency as applied to individual life-choices is primarily attributable to two factors: the lack of a psychological and developmental perspective, and an overly idealistic reading of queer identity. First, despite a general acknowledgment of the problem, queer theory ultimately--and sometimes willfully--neglects the ways in which politically relevant subjectivities and social actions are informed by unique life experiences and developmental trajectories, thereby reproducing a narrow vision of agency. In fact, for all of its talk about subjectivity and agency, queer theory demonstrates a remarkable lack of interest in individual phenomenologies that do not prefigure or follow from the moment of resistance. Informed by poststructural critiques, most queer theorists continue to reject any form of "psychologism" as inherently reductive, mechanistic, and/or essentialist, and tend to conflate psychology, in general, with the universalizing discourses of psychoanalysis. This position is evident in Halperin's Saint Foucault (1995), which argues that one of Foucault's major contributions to the study of sexuality was to remove it, once and for all, from the realm of psychology:

Even and exactly as Foucault politicizes sex, he also depsychologigizes

it .... More specifically, Foucault's antipsychoanalytic

approach to sexuality makes it possible, as well as

sensible and proper, to treat homophobia as a political, not

a psychological problem: it implies that the causes of homophobia

are to be sought not in psychic life, in fantasy, or in

the vicissitudes of human development (p. 121; emphasis in

original).

What is troubling about this and similar perspectives is not their legitimization of cultural and political analyses of sexuality, but rather their delegitimization of the study of individual differences and their relevance to the developmental subjectivity of the sexual actor. Implicit in these arguments is the deep-seated belief that a psychological perspective is incompatible with social, cultural, political, and historical forms of analysis, a bias that is unwarranted today (Herdt, 1997; Shweder, 1991; Shweder and Levine, eds., 1984; Stigler, Shweder, and Herdt, eds., 1990). And although several queer theorists use Freud and psychoanalysis, not as a foil, but in more constructive and creative ways (Bersani, 1995; Butler, 1990, 1993; Grosz, 1994), the resultant hybrids, while certainly productive, tend to drain meaning out of the person. For instance, Butler, Bersani, and Grosz each use psychoanalysis in service of the general poststructural assault on the fiction of the unified self.